Spying the World from your Laptop -- Identifying and Profiling Content Providers and Big Downloaders in BitTorrent

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how an adversary can spy on BitTorrent users over an extended period, revealing content providers, big downloaders, and compromising user privacy, which challenges BitTorrent's legal adoption.

Contribution

It introduces exploits that enable long-term spying on BitTorrent users, identifying content providers and large downloaders, and exposing privacy vulnerabilities.

Findings

Collected 148 million IPs over 103 days

Identified content providers for 70% of contents

Showed that few providers inject most contents and are located abroad

Abstract

This paper presents a set of exploits an adversary can use to continuously spy on most BitTorrent users of the Internet from a single machine and for a long period of time. Using these exploits for a period of 103 days, we collected 148 million IPs downloading 2 billion copies of contents. We identify the IP address of the content providers for 70% of the BitTorrent contents we spied on. We show that a few content providers inject most contents into BitTorrent and that those content providers are located in foreign data centers. We also show that an adversary can compromise the privacy of any peer in BitTorrent and identify the big downloaders that we define as the peers who subscribe to a large number of contents. This infringement on users' privacy poses a significant impediment to the legal adoption of BitTorrent.